Wednesday, January 15, 2014

New Power-Ups Rulings from DF Felltower

Here a few more rulings I've made for my game, specifically on new Power-Ups.

I wrote or helped write a lot of the Power-Ups but they don't all fit the flavor of the game I'm running. Others I thought would be fun to tweak.

Wizard Hunter: This advantage from Pyramid 3/61 is available in my games, but you must float your skill to the lower of Perception or Dexterity to take advantage of it during an attack.

Notes: This is to add some depth to the ability. The "lower of" aspect is to prevent a DX 15, Per 20 Scout from having a better chance to hit through a Missile Shield than someone without one.

And to answer one of my player's questions - no, this does not affect most Blocking spells. It would bypass Iron Arm just like a meteoric weapon would, but similarly it wouldn't bypass Phase or Blink. The wizard still gets to defend if you bypass a defense such as Missile Shield or Force Dome. Wizards aren't stupid, they know this exists, and they don't need to know you know it to assume that some people do and act accordingly. Those who use Iron Arm to defend should know better.

Unarmed Master: I have a genre switch already in my games that means that martial artists don't need this to prevent themselves from getting hurt when attacking or parried. But despite that, this advantage's cost is unchanged. The benefit of this advantage in my game is the stackable striker. Striker + claws + Seven Secret Kicks/Fists of Power + Karate damage bonuses = awesome.

Mifter Teeth - This is available, but you can't double-draw arrows this way, so you're limiting yourself to single shots.

Notes: I think that makes this less of a no-brainer and more of a "do I want more defense or more offense?" But yeah, silly as this one is, if you really want to shoot bows with your teeth, go for it. Don't critically miss and roll "hit yourself."

3 comments:

I figure Mifter Teef is mostly useful for when you arm gets chopped off (which happens quite a bit in my game at any rate).

What I'm trying to figure out is what Sacrificial Block is good for. Shield-Wall Training just seems way better. I guess you can take both so that you can block for people next to you and behind you, but the latter doesn't seem that great.

Shield Wall Training doesn't let you block for folks behind you, so that's what it does. I've seen people argue it's not worth taking both, but I haven't seen a person take one but not take the other so it seems to price out fairly enough. I do think it would have been a better to merge them in some way but that wasn't an option when we wrote DF15 (which is where it originates.)I mused a bit on the pricing here: http://dungeonfantastic.blogspot.com/2013/04/musings-on-pricing-shield-wall-training.htmlPutting the removal of the -2 for a large shield in one perk, and blocking for others on another, would parallel how weapons do it a bit better IMO, but again, that's not how it shook out when they were written.

As for Retroactive Poisoning vs. Combat Poisoning, I disagree. RP is one shot per level, Combat Poisoning is an ability you can use over and over again. So it's 1 point for once/session vs. you can choose to poison things at speed any time, and can multiply-dose weapons too, which RP doesn't allow for. Having both is best, but RP doesn't fully cover what CP allows so I don't think it makes it worthless.

Sorry, should have say that RP does allow for multiple doses, but not multiple uses. Typed before I checked. So you could have RP 1, and once per session stick 4 doses of a venom you've got on you on the blade and make your roll. If you want to do that again, you need another level. CP will let you re-poison weapons over the whole session for 1 point.